WHILE I have an appreciation of the arts I am bemused as to why a select number of local groups have had over £2m thrown at them (“Cash bonanza” Examiner February 5).
I do not dispute that most groups are run by good people and welcome you to their various seminars and workshops, provided you are willing to pay. But what they do is aimed strictly at a small number of people and benefits a minority of them.
When it comes down to it they are simply interested in promoting themselves and favoured others. To get the financing for this they make the pretence that they are taking what they do to the underprivileged masses when in fact they are not.
The Poetry Business proclaims its own self-importance and how wrong it was for Kirklees Cultural Services to cut funding last year. How can they claim to be a great publishing house when virtually all of what they publish doesn’t even get to bookshops and is the work of relatively unknowns and obscure writers.
What does their work mean to people in the street? Would they like to tell us how much money they generate annually from book sales and how much of the company is self-financed? This organisation, like many others, would never have existed had it not being for the generosity of the tax payer and other subsidies. Kirklees Council saw them for what they were and did the right thing.
Arguably, what these groups do is not really a representation of accessible culture but that of high-class arts they wish to promote and preserve purely for their own benefit.
Why should we be fooled into subsidising the fantasies and egos of mainly over-privileged pretenders that simply reinforce their deluded beliefs that they are something they are not?
Simon Softe
Huddersfield
